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Introduction to SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services

Lots of people (myself included) are excited about the coming release of
Microsoft SQL Server "Yukon," the successor to SQL Server 2000. But you don't
have to wait until 2005 to see one of the advances that "Yukon" is delivering to
developers. Last month Microsoft released SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services, an
add-on for the current version of SQL Server (it will be packaged with new
copies of SQL Server 2000 later this year). In this article, I'll introduce
Reporting Services and show you how you might make use of it in your own
development efforts.

The Reporting Services Architecture

Reporting Services runs as a middle-tier server, as part of your existing
server architecture. You need to have SQL Server 2000 installed for the
database server, and Internet Information Services 6.0 as a Web server. The
report server engine takes in report definitions, locates the corresponding
data, and produces the reports. You can interact with the engine through the
Web-based Report Manager, which also lets you manage things like refresh
schedules and notifications. End users view the report in a Web browser, and
can export it to PDF, XML, or Excel with the click of a button